Packaged foods ready for thawing, warming, and eating have become very commonplace. The foods can be frozen and/or sealed in convenient sized packages by the food processor. The food product can be a large quantity of processed food such as packaged vegetables, individually assembled food products such as sandwiches, or complete dinners with three or more individual food servings. Necessarily, equipment is needed for the efficient packaging of the food product. Quite often the equipment must be individually designed and built for the intended food product to be packaged. The equipment must be capable of receiving food in bulk, separating or segregating it to desired serving sizes and packaging it. The equipment must be capable of handling large amounts of the raw food product in a very fast manner so as to work efficiently and competitively with manual packaging operations.
One food product in particular which is becoming more popular in package form are sandwiches. Hamburger and sausage sandwiches are quite common; however, they typically are not assembled by the food processor and packaged as a complete product ready for consumption. One reason for this is the lack of equipment to efficiently handle bread, buns or biscuits and combine them with a pre-cooked meat patty or fillet in sandwich form.
In accord with a demonstrated need, there has been developed an apparatus of assembling a biscuit and meat sandwich ready for packaging and shipping. The apparatus of the invention is unique and satisfies a need in the food processing industry.